Land degradation in northern Ghana is visible from the roadside: farmland that carried trees within living memory now carries none, and soils that will not hold water through a dry spell.
Over the last three trimesters, TTFPP students working with farmer groups in the West Gonja district have run paired demonstration plots — one managed as the farmer normally would, one using a combination of farmer-managed natural regeneration, biochar from groundnut shells and a revised planting date.
The comparison is the point. Extension advice delivered as a talk is easy to discount. Two plots side by side at harvest, on the same soil and the same rainfall, are not.
Farmer groups in the district are now raising seedlings in their own nurseries, and the district assembly has asked the directorate to extend the work to two further communities in the coming year.
